Writing from the point of view of the opposite sex. January 2 2012
How does a woman write a man’s point of view in a novel, and vice versa? It reminds me of the song in “My Fair Lady” – why can’t a woman be more like a man? Joyce Carol Oates once said that a woman should be able to walk past a barracks with its windows open and go on to write fiction about men in the military. (This was before women were in the military in large numbers.)
First, are we so different? I believe that men and women want similar things, when the chips are down, and that we are more alike than we are different. That said, my male friends tell me that we have completely different ways of seeing the world. Nobody is ever going to know for sure, so what do fiction writers do?
Interact with, talk to, make friends with many members of the opposite sex. (In love affairs, especially at the beginning, people often lie about what they think, feel, do.) I have spent my life among male people, starting in a family with three brothers, and I have had time to make some observations and feel some empathy. But it’s not the same as being in the skin of a female protagonist, in which so much is a given.
Male writers have tried writing as women far more than women writers have tried writing as men. D.H. Lawrence had a brave go at writing what women feel during sex and as a teenager I thought he was more of an expert than I was. Most male writers are terrible at what women feel during sex – and it’s usually through having sex with women that men get close to us. But – Emma Bovary? Anna Karenina? Natasha Rostova? All of them real women. So it’s the quality of the writing that counts.
Think of the men in Jane Austen’s novels. They don’t have sex lives, but they are real people. Is the clue not simply to write the opposite sex as real people? To get free of fantasy and prejudice and try to get inside their heads? I don’t believe a writer should go through life only ever writing about his or her own gender; it’s limiting, it’s reductive. It’s what leads to “chick-lit” and “guy books” – both equally boring. So my only suggestion is: be brave, check it out with someone of the opposite gender, but trust your own thinking, intuition, imagination, and maintain complete respect for the characters in your fiction who are not on your own team.
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One of the best modern male authors capturing the inner world of the female is Arthur Golden. Memoirs of a Geisha was, in my opinion, absolutely amazing. I recall that half way through reading it, I had to look at the cover and remind myself that it was authored by a man!
The late African-American novelist Hal Bennett once suggested to me that if I wanted to write well from a woman’s point of view I should go buy some sexy lingerie, a dress and heels, and wear that while I wrote. I never tried it, though I suspect Hal may have. I’d be interested to hear if that has worked for anyone else.
Similarly, my friend Robert S., who concocted sexual confessions from a woman’s point of view for Penthouse magazine, used to do so wearing only boxer shorts and a spiked World War I German helmet. I guess it made him feel sexy.